Ireland

I guess yesterday would have been the day to blog about my Irish memories. But a dinner of corned beef and colcannon with Tim's friends degenerated into "when I was in Ireland" stories--and even as I participate in them, I'm annoyed with them. So I'd rather tell my favorite memories on an insignificant day.

Mornings. My classmates and I were bunkered in these rather odd apartment-like dorms off the campus of University College Galway. I think there were perhaps 4-6 bedrooms in each, with a tiny living room and kitchen. For the first week or so, my only roommate was an older, retired woman. I was shy and didn't talk to her, she got upset, and left the program. So I had the whole apartment to myself. Class didn't start until 10:30. I had a breakfast pass to a cafe next door, and I loved their heavy brown bread, but again--shy, so I stayed home. Each morning I awoke at a leisurely time, made myself a big breakfast and a pot of tea, and spent an hour or two relaxing, reading, and writing (either for assignment or in my journal). It was the first time I'd been on my own--and I acknowledged every single second as it happened, and again in my journal. And long, relaxing breakfasts fed my soul. (I'd do them now if I weren't so tired every time my alarm goes off.)

Piercings. A week or two into the program. After a late night bonding over Murphy's pints, I made a new friend. Cathy. I confessed to her that I missed my nose piercing, and we set out to find a piercing shop. I made my appointment, but needed some courage. We cut afternoon classes and went to a tiny pub for a few pints. I didn't know back then the reason you weren't supposed to be drunk for piercings or tattoos wasn't for judgment reasons, but for blood thinning reasons. The piercer agreed to do it anyway (she probably believed my surprise and naivety). Still, still, still I remember with excruciating physical memory the heightened awareness I had of the needle going through flesh in my buzzed condition. And then I subsequently bled for half an hour. I hung my face under her cold faucet until we were able to leave. We went back to the same pub and showed off my piercing. Cathy and I wiled away two or three pints there--which, I soon discovered, was the perfect amount to settle into half-past buzzed and well on the way to drunk. Our conversations were the kind made of heads huddled together, hands flashing and gesturing, laughter, and sudden friendship.

I remember it every day when I put away the dishes. I squirrelled away a pint glass from the campus pub, somehow managed to carry it across the ocean without breakage, and have been using it ever since. It's one of my most treasured souvenirs from that summer. July 3/4, a celebration in Ireland akin to our St. Patrick's Day festivities. Cathy met Michael that day (pronounce MEEEE-hall), fell in love, and I made off with a glass.

And there are more memories. Lots locked up in the vault of embarrassing, involving--of course involving--a guy and bad endings. Sometimes I wish I could forget the time and experiences that existed before I could be halfway suave about love and lust. But then I'd also have to forget what a life-changing experience Ireland was, and how I grew up and became an entirely different person when I was only 20.

Sometimes I think about going back. I ache for it. Galway felt like home (and it was. My dad's father's family came from there; his mother's from County Kerry). But it also feels like a place best left in the past. I can't imagine visiting the same streets and pubs I went to eight years earlier. I think it would be extraordinarily difficult to encounter the past like that. It's difficult at times to even look at the pictures, and, god, I can't bear to read the journal entries.

Thinking back

The day after I graduated from college, my belongings were packed in the back of a truck, and my parents and I drove to Chicago.

Growing up, every time we'd visit, we'd arrive the same way, from the south, up the Dan Ryan to LSD, and then the home stretch to my grandparents' home just north of the city, in Evanston. Coming up Sheridan Road in Rogers Park, I'd get a thrill of excitement, because to me, Rogers Park was the city. It was the embodiment of everything I believed Chicago to be.

So I was finally there! The city was mine! (Well, sort of. The fact that I lived in what could technically be called a suburb didn't phase me.) Evanston wasn't a typical suburb, anyway. It was a cross between being its own city and a small town.

That summer, I ran the baked streets, getting to know the cafes, vintage bookstores, and thrifts. I worked at a cafe near Northwestern, and I flirted with the intellectual professors who'd spend their Sunday mornings over my coffee and a newspaper. Sometimes nights I'd walk through the neighborhood on the lake, the one with unbelievably fancy mansions and daydream about what it would be like to live in one.

I was lonely still, missing my Kansas boyfriend and worried about job prospects, but it was also a glorious time, filled with newness. The world unrolled itself at my feet, and I could have done anything.

Memories like that rush back at the touch of hot summer wind, or the smell of coffee beans freshly ground. Certain music can resurrect the exact feelings I had at any given moment during that period. The experience is so deeply imprinted upon my psyche.

It goes without saying that there is an entire chamber of my heart devoted to Evanston. I still work here, 9.5 years after that beautiful summer. So I was excited to also do my internship here.
And it's different.

I'm older.

I'm seeing a different side of the city, the one where 25% of the citizens live at or below the poverty line. Where the streets I formerly skipped down, if I turn left instead of right, I discover low-income areas I never knew existed.

Knowing about the urban problems that Evanston's pretty, tree-lined streets cover up sour my memories of the perfect college "town" I used to know. It's hard to enjoy its beauty when I know about the uneasy alliance between the priviledged and unpriviledged.

But sometimes, sometimes sometimes, I'm able to walk into the organic cafe that's near my internship, sit down with some tea, and be transported back, unfettered, in the glorious spell that this place once cast upon me.

Going overboard

It's no secret. If you know me, you know I go overboard when I get excited about something. Even better, when it's something creative, for someone I love.

Today I made a book for mom's 60th birthday. I asked everyone who knows her to write a something about her, and an overwhelming number of people responded. Their words are the true treasure of this gift, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I found some beautiful card stock, and sewed the booklet myself.



If you can read the words, this one is lovely. The woman who wrote it compares aging to an antique barn that silvers with age and becomes more beautiful.




Sisters


Everyone mentioned her lovely pottery




Her beautiful smile and wide-reaching enthusiasm


This one was my favorite, from an old friend of my parents: "I have a million memories of your mom from the first time I saw her sticking her head out of an apartment window on East Lake Terrace to working at the Little King Sandwich Shop with Mike to teaching me how to take photographs with a homemade pinpoint camera on the back porch of their west side apartment to playing in the surf at Palisades with Danny the summer they lived in Michigan to camping in the Rockies and riding home with our heads poking out of the sun deck of Mike’s old VW Bus to riding bikes to the Loop to the last time I saw her at the party at your house and, do you know what, in every single one of those memories right up to the last one, your mom is one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever been lucky enough to know."

Sound

For Christmas, an aunt and uncle got us an alarm clock. It is the clock to end all clocks, with a laser display that will shine the time and outside temperature (there's a remote sensor) on the ceiling when the alarm goes off. And it has soothing sounds to help you fall asleep. Things like Rainforest, Waves, Thunder, Rain, Summer Night, and so on. They're all really cool, and for digital sounds--impressively realistic. So much that when we tried out out Thunder, I felt this sword go through me and I couldn't move.

I was instantly transported back to Kansas springtime. Junior prom, to be exact, when it started storming after the dance, on the way to the after-party, and Sarah and I held our dyed shoes in our hands, and skipped through the puddles to the parties. My first party that included beer, boys, and an NC-17 movie, and arriving home at 5:30 a.m., the first light on the horizon, and fog lifting off the sodden ground.

I guess smell is supposedly the best sense memory we have, but for me, it's sound. I have so many sound memories that affect me on a daily basis, but only a few smell memories I remember right now (one of which was a random whiff of junior high locker room while crossing the street in Chicago a few years ago). And I can't even conjure up what that smell could possibly have been now, yet I can still hear refrains from songs in my head, the way my first car sounded when I revved the engine, and what our phone ring sounded like when we shared a party line.

Camp

I listened to This American Life today; it was a rerun from 1998 about camp stories. It reminded me so much about my own camp experiences, and my heart ached a little at missing it so much. Things ended really badly for me--no perfect final summer to round out my memories--so for the longest time, I pushed thoughts to the back of my mind and when I thought about it at all, it was while sleeping, in nightmares.

But the truth is, mostly camp was a little crystalline bubble of perfection, an escape from the normal angst of teenage years, a wooded oasis of peace for six summers. I'd give anything to be able to return in some capacity. Like maybe there's a summer camp out there in the wilds of Wisconsin or Michigan who needs a social worker on staff?

I felt like I was a completely different person there. Still me, I suppose, but electrified. (The things I would do to make a kid laugh . . .) Maybe I remembered being a camper--of course I did--and as a counselor I wanted to make sure the kids took away wonderful memories like I had.

Two things stick out in my mind as important and special. The second year I counseled, during a junior high week, we had Invitational during vespers. The invitational was the one night during the week where we took communion and invited everyone in camp to accept Jesus into their heart. For campers who had been coming back summer after summer, this was a meaningful tradition, and the cabin chosen lead vespers tried its hardest to make the service a tearjerker. The counselors stayed behind to talk to any kid who needed it. Technically, this was for discussing spiritual issues, but inevitably kids who had gone through rough patches, like losing a friend or having parents get divorced, would stay to cry on someone's shoulder. I don't remember what happened at the service, or after, I just remember going back to the cabin and putting the girls to bed and laying down myself. A few minutes after I turned out the lights, one of my girls got me, and said another camper was crying. I crawled up to the girl's top bunk, and said, "sweetie, what's wrong?"

I wasn't the type who called people "sweetie" or "honey," but the girl was crying so hard that it slipped out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying.

"Sweetie, what's wrong?" and I gathered her in my arms.

She said, with difficulty through her sobs, that she didn't know whether or not she had Jesus in her heart. How do you know if you do?

That was a conundrum for me as well. I was supposed to be some sort of spiritual advisor for these girls, yet I wasn't even sure how I felt about things myself. At that very moment, I didn't know if I had Jesus in my heart. Was he supposed to wave and say hi once he got there or what? And since he hadn't, did that mean he hadn't shown up? I was only 18 or 19, fairly new to Christianity myself, and not 100% sold on it. Honestly, I think I was a camp counselor more for the kids and less because I was an avid Christian.

But you don't say that to an 11-year-old kid in spiritual crisis. You don't admit that you have no answers when she's sobbing and looking to you to ease her pain somehow.

So I asked her things about her belief, and I talked about how you never know anything for sure--you just have to believe. And believing makes things real. She stopped crying, and thanked me, and we both went back to sleep.

I don't know why this ranks up at the top of my experiences, but it seems so special to me.

The second thing happened my final year of counseling, for the most part, a pretty miserable time because of my co-counselors, not because of the kids. Senior high week towards the end, we had a closing ceremony for the graduating seniors--yet another opportunity to wring the most possible tears out of an evening. This particular class was special to me. They had been freshman when I was a senior, so I had been both camper with and counselor to them. After the ceremony, one boy said he had something important to talk to me about, and could we go for a walk. We ended up sitting by the lake under the stars. I was slightly nervous, because I knew I had to be careful about anything with the slightest hint of inappropriateness, and a counselor and camper of opposite sexes off somewhere alone could fall into that category. But he and I had been friends since we'd met, at a youth rally four years before.

He talked about meeting me then. As a senior, Kurt Cobain and grunge had finally hit Marion, and I embraced the combat boots, flannel shirts, and what Hannah called my "elephant" pants. I ran around the youth rally, according to him, this really cool person, unlike any Christian he had ever met. Like him, he thought, and he decided he maybe could find a place for himself in religion. (It didn't hurt that he was a hot little skater punk. I have a weak spot for them.) He said he considered me his spiritual mentor. I didn't know how to respond, how to let him know that no one had ever said anything more wonderful or meaningful to me in my life. How to thank him in a way that conveyed how honored I was. I don't remember what I said.

I'm not the person I was back then. But I suppose I don't have access to the same environment, and the world seems like a harder place now--no place for the same blissful summers where you're closed off from the real world, existing in a special dream place like camp.

The first summer counseling, I felt alive and hypersensitive every single moment, drinking in the experience. I made friendships with my co-counselors that I thought would be rock solid for the rest of our lives, but the intensity that camp fosters rarely translates successfully to the mundane world. I thought I'd fallen in love, too, and remember like it was yesterday a walk we took, on the way to the chapel, revealing our feelings and the tragedy that we could not be together (for myriad reasons).

Oh, everything was so dramatic and important back then. (Maybe it came from being 18, too.)

My last summer counseling was night and day different than the first. I felt I was on one side of a canyon, my co-workers on the other, and I couldn't figure out how to build a bridge across to them. It didn't seem like they were trying to connect with me, either. I felt so isolated, and threw myself into the work, ignoring the importance of connecting with them. The tone was different, too. I always looked forward to immersing myself in a deeply spiritual summer and making new friendships, but suddenly the space was no longer safe. I was no model Christian during my college years, but the woods were sacred to me. The other counselors were profane, disrespectful, pretty much assholes, really.

The hardest week was senior high. I was 20, so not much older than some of them, but a few of the counselors were where I was two years previous--just a summer out of their own camping experience, and good friends with some of the very people they'd have to take charge of. S, the boys' counselor I shared a cabin and responsibilities with, he was my age, with a year or two of counseling experience, thus theoretically more capable than some of the younger counselors. Yet he was one of the worst. It was more important to him to be liked, and he took inappropriateness to an extreme.

In the middle of the week, he supervised the kids who wanted to drag their mattresses out to the communal porch to sleep. I stayed in my bunk on the girls' side with a few of the campers who didn't want to brave the mosquitos. The porch crowd didn't get much sleep, and I didn't close my eyes all night. I don't know what reality S was experiencing that made him think that sex, sexist, and race jokes were somehow appropriate in that setting, but nonetheless, that's what he was telling. Then he started talking shit about the other counselors. I could hear everything clearly through my open window in the quiet woods that night, and I felt like I was being kicked in the stomach over and over and over. Today, though, I don't remember if he said anything bad about me. Everything about the night was so horrible, him talking cruelly about me would not have made things noticeably worse. I don't know if it was an idea that has only come to me over the years, or if I thought it but couldn't execute it: I should have gotten up, gone out to the porch, and asked S if we could take a walk. The kids, of course, would have known as soon as we were out of earshot, that he would be in deep trouble--or so he would have told them later. I was so meek and passive that I probably couldn't have said how I really felt. Or maybe I would have just started crying.

I am slightly proud to believe if this happened today, I have grown enough that I would have addressed it. Back in 1995, though, I stayed in my bunk, crying and praying all night.

And then I think of the "Footsteps" poem, and I felt God with me that night, but what I would have given not to be there, listening to hatefulness where there should have been love.

I wanted to leave the next day. I was leaving early anyway, to study in Ireland, skipping the last week of the summer. I only had a week left before then, and I didn't think I could make it after that night. The only person I felt close to was the camp director, and she asked me not to go.

So I stayed, and got through the end of senior high week, and the next week. I don't know how, or what happened. That night was burned so deeply on my consciousness that, more than ten years later, it's really the only thing I remember from that hellish summer.

I relived it in dreams for years after. My photos are stuffed far out of sight; last time I checked, it even hurt to look at them. My whole love affair with camp was obscured by that last summer. It seemed so unfair that I couldn't even locate my good memories of it; my sleep self only recalled the bad.

But ten years have passed. I'm a different person now, which is good. Maybe someday, back in Kansas, visiting for the summer, I could go back and make peace with the woods again.

Snowy

We've had a winter storm this week. It's beautiful, the way the snow has blanketed everything in about 10 inches and brings purity to all the ugly winterness, but it's fairly miserable if you want to do anything other than cozying up at home.

It's been snowing a lot this year, which reminds me of being a kid. Is it just wistful memories of snow-filled Christmasses, or is global warming really putting a crimp in winter precipitation?

The sad reality of snow in Chicago is that it's pure white for about 30 minutes, and then it's grey slush as traffic plows through it. And the salt! While I appreciate its qualities for easing my morning commute, it's scary to see the big trucks out constantly, spraying chunks every time it snows. Even after the snow melts and the streets dry, a passing car will kick up dust that lands, salty, on my tongue. Or worse still, the air I breath is saturated with it. My chapped lips taste salty after I walk the few blocks to the train.

When I was a kid, after a big snowfall, I'd go outside with a big mixing bowl and fill it full. I'd pour orange juice or Coke over it, and enjoy my slush. I even remember once at Hannah's house, sweetening milk with sugar and frozen strawberries for our "ice cream." It was such a treat. I loved it so much. I think if I could, I would make my snow slushes still. Adulthood has not cooled my love of slushies.

It verges on tragic, then, what is happening to the environment. Tim reminded me that during wars, warriors would salt the earth to prevent any life taking root after.

"There are so many different ways to be connected to people"

Tonight makes twice in one week that I've put on the B-52's "Good Stuff" album. I wonder if it's the weather? I'm sick of the snow and slush, and that album brings up memories of the summer of 1992, when we spent nearly every day at the "beach," and every evening cruising Main, blaring it.

Or maybe it's because I'm watching My So-Called Life again, and I am transfixed by it. My past few free evenings have created a bubble of 1994. I had wondered how well it had aged, and it still hit me the way it did the first time, hard across the chest so it was hard to breathe for a while. I'm a different person now, though, so, while I still love Jordan Catalano, I finally realized why all my friends were pro-Brian Krakow.

I don't know where the show was headed before cancellation. The final episode has so many unfinished stories.

You remember--it was the one with the letter:

Dear Angela, I know in the past I've caused you pain, and I'm sorry. And I'll always be sorry till the day I die. And I hate this pen I'm holding, because I should be holding you. I hate this paper under my hand because it isn't you. I even hate this letter because it's not the whole truth. Because the whole truth is so much more than a letter can even say. If you wanna hate me, go ahead. If you wanna burn this letter, do it. You could burn the whole world down. You could tell me to go to hell. I'd go. If you wanted me to. And I'd send you a letter from there. Sincerely, Jordan Catalano

But it also ended exactly right, with Angela riding off with Jordan, watching Brian out of the window, knowing he actually wrote it.

It was a perfect, perfect encapsulation of what is terrible, tragic, horrific, wonderful, amazing, and inspiring about being a teenager.

Photos

Last night I put on some good music and dug through my photo pile. As much as I love having a digital camera, I am so grateful for the old cameras that spawned loads of pictures of my past. I learned a lot, too--mostly that most of my hairstyles were serious missteps, and I need someone to sit me down and firmly tell me exactly what haircut I am best suited for.

I also used to be a lot more photogenic. I have millions of pictures of me leaning into a friend, us beaming widely and authentically--and beautifully. I don't remember having more self-confidence when I was younger (in college and after). But I do see so much happiness in the pictures, which is a universal beautifier. And friends. I see lots of friends. That's got to be what's missing now.

Another reason for looking through pictures: A friend asked about summer camps, and I thought of mine, Googled it, and found a web page for it. There were enough pictures that I could tell how much it had changed--and hardly recognized it. I made my way to the staff list for the upcoming summer, and saw a name I knew under Art Director. It took the wind out of me. If my memory does not fail me, she was my favorite camper 4th- and 5th-grade week my second year of counseling. That would have made her, what, nine or ten? And now she's the art director at the camp that, when I was there, could barely sustain crafts hour once a week for the littler kids.

I feel so old.

So I looked through my camp photos, and found a few pictures of her and me. I think I'm going to get copies made then send her a note with the pictures this summer at camp. I feel a bit tentative about it, as I always do contacting people with whom I'm long out of touch, but I remember what it was like at camp. I hope they still do post-lunch mail call, make a big fuss out of people who receive a lot of letters, and sign them up for an act in the weekly talent show. I would have loved to get a letter from an old counselor sharing memories with me, remembering me. I don't know, though, if I had been a camper at ten, if I would have remembered my counselor ten years later. I do know how influential counselors are, and I do still remember the ones I had the years I attended in high school. It could be like always remembering your first-grade teacher.

God I feel old.

Obsession

I wonder if part of the below problem is the obsession I've developed with this mix tape. It's pulling me away from my life.

It's odd, really. I've always wanted to recreate it on CD, to preserve it. But I didn't seriously decide to do it until a month ago or so. And in the beginning, it seemed an almost insurmountable task. Trying to track down some song titles only identified by artists with whom I am unfamiliar. Finding songs among my own collection, and online. Deciding where to purchase them, or whether I could fly under the radar and download them for free--or from Russia.

It's become my evening task, to work on this CD. Our slow Internet connection has stretched this into a many-days project. I am absorbed in the downloading, the searching, the categorizing, and organizing.

And yet so quickly, I realized last night that there are but two songs left before I am finished. I could have continued working to complete the disc, but I didn't. I couldn't bring myself to. I don't know why. But I wouldn't be surprised if this compilation--previously a matter of life and death (ish) and immediacy--languishes for a while.

It suddenly occurs to me that I'm trying to bring my past into my now. Fitting, because I'm reconnecting with old friends, but at the same time, I'm forging new relationships with them. This CD is just a symbol, a party favor for a specific, smoky, friend-filled moment in my life.

What will it even be like to hear those songs, those memories, blaring in my car, in my home, instead of piping directly in my ear from a rickety Walkman, from a worn-out tape? (There's something so secretive and private about listening to music through headphones.) What will it be like sharing (what I'm now realizing is) an intimate part of myself with people who didn't know me in the moment these songs became connected? Do I even remember who I was in that moment?

Nuclear War

When I was in grade school--young; younger than 10 or 11--it would have been the Reagan era. The Cold War. Fear of nuclear destruction. I didn’t know the specifics of anything, just tail ends of overheard conversations between my parents and their friends about the dire state of the world.

That whole period of my life--what I only remember of it was a nagging, unknown, unarticulated fear. I didn't believe I'd live to be an adult.

--I knew the effects of nuclear war. I knew the story of Sadako and the thousand paper cranes. It wasn't a far reach for my imagination to picture myself running through the fields of a Hiroshima-like Kansas, damaged flesh peeling away in the wind. There was something brutal and poetic about the way the dry wheatfields around my house figured into the nightmare.--

The sky was yellow in the summer. While I knew the color actually heralded tornados, I still likened it to the end of the world. I would lay in the front yard looking up into the sky, absolutely terrified of its vastness and my tiny existence my comparison. I clutched at the grass, certain that gravity would suddenly not apply and the universe would pluck me off the dirt and suck me into the sky.

The cloudless sky would moan and wail back at me. Those ominous, animalistic noises . . . I have never been able to articulate them to others. The closest explanation would be to liken them to the whine of a far-off plane coursing across the sky. Yet the horizons were empty. But the sounds still echoed through my head.

And then, at times, only when I was still quite young, the planes would appear. Fighter planes, streaking across the prairie and somehow honing in above the only house on the section: ours. The moans of an empty sky would be rifted by shrieks as the planes narrowly avoided our chimney and the windows shook and cracked.

Each time, crouched on the floor, fingers in our ears, praying that this was not the one time they'd really drop the bomb.

Eventually, the planes stopped. And tornados were more frequent so the yellow sky became a harbinger only of a different type of destruction, one that--oddly enough--seemed far less immediate and dangerous.

And then I left Kansas, and the wails of the sky became planes instead of phantom shrieks. And the sky did not yellow as often.

But sometimes, the memories of despair can return in late summer, in the heat-soaked city, when it is too hot still to wrap my bare skin up in a semblance of protection against the softly menacing whispers.

Church

At the conference last week, one of the breakfast keynote speakers was a Chicago police officer, ordained minister, and survivor. She was a very powerful speaker. The topic was Faith and Domestic Violence, I think. She opened with prayer, and said stuff like, "We as Christians need to . . ." and I closed her out. I thought, "How dare you assume we're all Christians?" I knew at least one woman besides myself in the room was definitely not one: the Indian woman who was yesterday's keynote speaker.* Her comments were punctuated with murmured "amens" through out the room; I was so uncomfortable. Then she recited a bible verse (maybe? I don't know. Maybe a poem.) and I realized I was singing it in my head. It was a song that I remembered from church camp.

* (I don't think I'm Christian anymore. And yet, somehow it feels blasphemous to say that outloud.)

And then I wondered: why am I struggling so hard against this? When I looked past my initial reactions of indignation and uncomfortableness, I remembered the comfort of religion. I remembered how church camp changed my life.

So we went to church on Sunday. It was one Tim had been to once or twice with a classmate. It was relatively new, held in the movie theatre. There was a worship band (usually made up of a drummer, bassist, guitarist, and a few singers), and the minister had a cordless mic so he could roam the floor. It opened with the band leading some songs. The music was typical electrified acoustic contemporary Christian, but no songs I knew in the past. But there was something to it.

My throat closed up, and I couldn't sing. I wanted to run, to leave the theatre and wait for Tim in the car. I thought I was having a panic attack. A few tears leaked out.

And I still don't know exactly why I was so scared. I think it relates to camp, and my memories. If you opened me up, I'd have a big frozen spot inside that holds together everything about camp.

* * *

It was the place where, in high school, I spent three summers talking about God and faith, and making amazing friends. Then in college, three summers counseling. I loved counseling even more. I got to spend six weeks there, instead of just one; and it was a magical place. When I left, and went back to my regular life, it was hard to see God everywhere, and live a spiritual life. There, it was just the way of life, and we all existed in a perfect bubble of nature, lazy days, friends, and the constant presence of God.

The first year, I counseled for myself. Since I loved being a camper, being a counselor was the logical next step. I made incredible bonds with my co-counselors. I thought these were friends I'd have for the rest of my life. The next two years, I did it for the kids. I remembered what an affect my own counselors had on me, and I couldn't believe kids came back the next year looking for me, excited to have me as their counselor because they loved me the year before.

The last year I was there, it was all about the kids. My coworkers were all assholes. (Strange, that would happen at a Christian camp.) Senior high week, my co-counselor slept outside on our porch with whichever campers wanted to. One night, I awoke to hearing them all whispering. My co-counselor took the lead in telling sexist and rascist jokes. I couldn't believe it. I should have gotten up, asked him to take a walk with me, and said, "look, this is incredibly inappropriate, and it makes me sad and uncomfortable." But I was shy, and just laid there crying all night. In the morning, I went to the director and begged her to let me quit and told her why. She didn't, or rather, she asked me to stick it out for another week (I was leaving early anyway--this was the summer I studied in Ireland). Because she was a good friend and a good boss, I did. It was hellish.

Because of that summer (and there's more; I'm not telling the whole story), whenever I'd think back on camp, it was with a bad taste in my mouth. All my dreams about it ended up as nightmares. (That is not a metaphor. I'd jerk away in the middle of the night, my heart pounding, or tears bathing my face.) It seemed like my entire six-year experience there was ruined because of that last summer. My feelings run deep, and are incredibly conflicted.

So that's probably why I wanted to run away and cry on Sunday.

We decided this movie theatre congregation wasn't the church for us, when we got home and Tim wanted to talk about it, and all I wanted to do was run the vacuum as loud as it could go, and not think. I couldn't even tell him what my feelings were because I couldn't articulate them. I just had this huge weight on my chest. But as we got to cleaning (the only way I was able to carry on a conversation), we realized that more than anything, we wanted to set Sunday aside as a special day. I felt happier cleaning and talking with him than I did listening to the minister talk about women's special blessings (in honor of Mom's Day).

So this is going to be our Sunday: awaken and have a good breakfast. Once a month, go to church. The next Sunday, conduct our own "church." The following, house cleaning. The next, our own church, and so on. I'm pleased with it.

Because I don't talk enough about the weather

I went walking outside last night, and the weather reminded me so much of what I grew up with in Kansas. I can't believe I'm finding it down here; I love it.

There was something powerful about the melancholic dark dampness of Kansas springs. In Chicago, it was grey for months, and then suddenly in the summer, hot as hell. In Kansas, and Alabama, the springtime sun dips behind a cloud, and the sky turns into rumbling dark moments of thunder and rain. It reminds me of high school. As much as I think, in theory, that high school was something to be endured, survived, and forgotten, there were times of incredible brilliance, too. My favorite memories are enclosed in a rainy day.

Prom. Junior, senior year? It doesn't matter anymore. They both took place during a spring storm. Suddenly school hierarchy melted away, and everyone was best friends. I attended both with my girl friends, no dates, and there was something fun and carefree about it, rather than depressing because of the lack of boy attention. I got to dance with someone I'd never admit to having a crush on. The (junior) prom I engineered ended up a masterful success. At an after-party, the class asshole taught me how to use a lasso, and we were friends for a brief moment. (That could have, of course, presaged our random drunken one-night-stands in college, but who knew at the time?) The after-after-party, the first party I ever attended that had beer (I was sheltered!), and an NC-17 movie. We ran barefoot in our princess dresses through the puddles to our cars, and we all drove home at dawn, still raining, to sleep for the whole weekend.

In Chicago, the grey-ness of winter drags at the soul, and it seems interminable to even hope that the sun is just in hiding. The grey days here have power behind them. A hint of menace, and thunder, and an exciting promise. Spring, rebirth? Seems like such a fucking cliche. But still.

Alfalfa

One day this week, when I got out of my car at the work parking lot, it smelled like freshly mown alfalfa. A strange and nostalgic smell, because I haven't smelled it since I lived in Kansas. It's a sweet farm smell. It's used as fodder for . . . I don't know. Probably cows, sheep, etc.

It took me a minute to reconcile the smell of alfalfa with the place, in the middle of a neighborhood where most windows are boarded up, men sit out on their porches all day and all night waiting for buyers, shiny Escalades are parked in driveways of houses that cost considerably less than that vehicle, people sleep in crawl spaces of the boarded-up houses because they have no real home, and there aren't any alfalfa fields for miles.

It reminded me of other smell memories from my childhood. The hay that filled the loft of Hannah's barn, where we'd build forts, play with kitties, and try to avoid snakes. The smell of her house, which reeked with the beauty of greenhouses, new construction, and the fruit orchard. My mom pounding on the worn chopping block counter, kneading out dough, which would soon fill the house with the yeasty smell of whole wheat bread baking. (And then the way she'd cut a slice right out of the oven, and it would crumble softly with heat, steam rising.)

Once LeAnn and I took to the milo field that encircled my house, and cut pathways in the rows (whether to create a maze or a fort, I don't remember). I don't know what milo smells like. It's probably more fragrant after harvest than in the field, but to me, the day had a scent. Hot hard wind, girls growing past childhood . . . there's always been a gorgeous despair in thinking about the swift flight of time, and remembering.